We're about to put our first virtualized Windows 2012 Hyper-V server on a small business site. Everything went fine with the installation, but I've noticed that when loading up the virtual machines, the process takes hours... For example, I created a new virtual machine with 4GBs of RAM, and installed Windows 7 64-bit edition from an ISO file... It took about two hours. I deleted this virtual machine and tried to create another Windows 7 64-bit virtual machine, this time using the actual DVD and it was just as slow.. EVEN with all other VMs shut down... I have another test copy of Hyper-V for Windows 8 at home that I use for learning, so I tried installing the same Windows 7 64-bit ISO on this workstation and it installed in twenty minutes. And this is just a workstation.
The server is a HP Proliant ML350 server with 24GBs RAM. If anything I would have expected the server to install the Windows 64-bit VM in twenty minutes, NOT the workstation !! On the face of it the only differences between the two systems is:
a) The server has two 500GB SAS drives, which are mirrored. There is no mirroring on the Windows 8 workstation.
b) The server had drive is partitioned in to a C: drive (for the host O/S) and a D: drive (for the virtual machines). There is only one partition on the Windows 8 workstation, which holds the operating system and the virtual machines.
Below is a graphic I drew up which I hope helps you visualise the hard drive setup.
This is a small site, so they wont pay for additional hard drives. Is there something about the way I have the disks set up that could cause the virtual machines to load slowly? Would it be better NOT to have two partitions on the host?
Thanks in advance for any advice offered.